


till human voices wake us, and we drown

by gogollescent, Quixotic



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, kids and fun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-26
Updated: 2011-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-24 01:23:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/257300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quixotic/pseuds/Quixotic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave is a sore winner, and Rose isn’t even sure what they’ve lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	till human voices wake us, and we drown

TT: Tell me about your dreams.

*

June in Washington was miraculously cool; the pallid Seattle sun turned the gray hairs at her mother’s temple floss-white, but it gave off no detectable warmth. Rose turned her head from left to right and felt the silence brush up against the bared side of her neck.

She had been thinking about the silence since they got out of the car. It was a suburban silence, and thus more polite than the silence of the kind of forests in which secret laboratories must, according to ancient law, be stowed. It was also very still.

Half a block from where they had parked, she realized that she was waiting for a breeze.

She set her teeth together with a noise like needles, dropped.

*

TG: well theyre fucking infested with eggs, for a start  
TG: and

*

Parts of John’s face were visible in the window; he had a palm pressed to the lower left pane, as well, and he was mouthing something excitedly. She could see the fractal shadows of leaves on his cheek.

Rose considered waving back, but her mother took her hand. She had yet to remove her driving gloves. The kid leather moved sleekly against Rose’s knuckles. Here, cut free from context, framed by neither guilt nor gilt, the gesture was both alien and innocent, like the glint of undyed steel in her mother’s coiffure which showed up on the morning after John Egbert’s thirteenth birthday and which was still, three years later, unaccounted for in all the arcane axioms of aggression (passive).

Mr. Egbert rose from his seat on the porch, his smile wan but honest in the shade of his nose. He said her mother’s name.

Her mother went on her tiptoes to receive his kiss, and he bent his head slightly, averting it at the last moment to avoid a full-on rhinocollision. Rose was conscious that she was paying close- not to say ‘prurient’ or ‘totally creepy’- attention to a parental act no sociotypically squeamish adolescent should attend, but she did not look away, even when new, soft creases formed in the material of her mother’s gloves where her mother’s grip tightened on Mr. Egbert’s arm.

Looking, she felt as if there were a hole in her stomach, a breeze blowing through her opened gut. She flexed her feet inside the padding of her sneakers.

The moment passed before the kiss did, and Rose did not see them part. “Let me help you with your bags, Rose,” said Mr. Egbert. His hand hung loosely curled against his thigh. Rose was seized with the sudden certainty that he did not remember what he had just done. There was no smudge of mauve on his lips to give him away: her mother had left off wearing lipstick three years ago. Her mother was watching the street, her face expressionless.

“Okay,” said Rose. She had exactly one bag, which he tried to sling over his shoulder and then, when that failed, dragged. Its wheels carved out dark wet arcs of crushed grass.

“Goodness, Rose,” said her mother, “what have you got in there?”

Rose said, “Nothing,” and glanced up at where John was still standing, in the window, his profile overlaid with a slanting reflection of the sky.

*

TG: youre always there  
TG: doesnt matter where there is  
TG: youre there

*

“Will you have a slice of cake?” said Mr. Egbert, when her mother was gone. John made a bluh face at her from over his father’s shoulder. It was extraordinary that he was capable of making faces at her from over his father’s shoulder rather than around his father’s elbow, and she spent a little while marveling at the new reality of John- his recognizably adult bone structure, his resemblance to a lamp-post- before remembering that she was expected to reply.

“It would be my pleasure,” she said. John rolled his eyes and laughed.

The cake turned out to be white and a little crumbly, like surrender. Unlike in most surrenders, there were secret strata of jam.

Dave arrived in the middle of her second piece. His advent was signaled by a vaguely mechanical roar, the screech of tires on asphalt, and, moments later, a dulcet rapping on the door. They could hear Mr. Egbert saying something warm in the hallway. Dave didn’t, audibly, reply.

He materialized in the kitchen shortly after. Exhaustion wafted off him like cheap perfume, and he slumped down at the table with the uncontrolled grace of a zombie on their day off.

“Strider,” said Rose, smiling at him over her fork.

“Hi, Dave!” said John, and, in the same breath, “Geez, you look like you got hit by a truck.”

“Nearly did,” said Dave, “now pass the pastrygoods.”

“Technically this is too heavy to constitute a pastry,” observed Rose, but she passed him a slice anyway. “How did you get here?”

“A limo drawn by wild mustangs, what else,” said Dave, somewhat indistinctly; his enunciation, already Texan, was not improved by the addition of a mouthful of cake.

“Ah,” said Rose, “you have finally purloined, wheedled or ritually summoned a motorcycle away from its rightful owner. I see.”

“Oh, man, that is so totally sweet,” John said. “Hey, if you ritually summoned it, does that mean you’ve finally sacrificed your ironically gettable goat?”

“Surely the most insincere pentacle ever formed from fresh intestines, if that’s so.”

Dave swallowed, and lifted the back of his hand to his mouth, although no cream in fact clung to his eternapursed lips. “I can hear its dying screams whenever I rev the engine,” he assured them, and helped himself to the lemonade.

*

TT: So are these dreams, or nightmares?  
TG: nightmares duh  
TT: Thanks.  
TG: usually youre dead

*

Afterward, the three of them retreated to John’s bedroom.

“You have a little,” John began, and pointed to his lower lip rather than articulating the thought, “ _here._ ”

Rose raised her thumb to the indicated area and prodded gingerly. Her thumb came away with a coherent globule of jam attacked to the tip, red and viscid and clear, like the half-remembered (but undoubtedly delicious) melange of saliva and blood. She swept her tongue along where her thumb had so bravely gone before it, tasting the inadequacy of the sweetness there.

“Thanks,” she said.

“No problem!” said John.

“Wow, what do you know,” said Dave, “I am pooped. Like a bucket of turds. Turds that are beginning to squeeze out their own tinier, browner turds. Think I’m gonna bunk down right here, thanks.”

He rolled over. The afternoon’s weight seemed to settle, on the flat of his shoulders. He had kicked his shoes off and he was not, as it turned out, wearing socks.

John looked from him to her.

There was a silence.

“ _Rude_ ,” said John.

“Impolite as fuck,” Rose agreed.

“What a blackguard.”

“In my estimation, both villainous and callow.”

“Let’s play tic-tac-toe on his feet,” John suggested.

Despite everything, she laughed.

*

TT: Oh.  
TG: yeah  
TG: oh

*

An hour later, the score was John: 1 and Rose: 37, largely because Rose had claimed all the cat’s games for herself on the logical basis that Jaspers would have been happy to donate his wins to her, had he been present. She didn’t mention that the Jaspers she was thinking of had been capable of human speech and trailing tentacles. The white sunlight that poured in through the window was finally going gold.

“This is nice,” said John, suddenly. They had dragged Dave onto his back around 4 p.m. and were now tracing delicate noughts and crosses into the lightly-haired skin of his shins. Dave was either profoundly asleep or so dedicated to this fantasy scenario as to beggar belief, or at least the beliefs of anyone who had not personally perused SBaHJ. Rose, who had, suspected the latter; but she had every respect for the impulse to waste part of the only week in a year one would spend with one’s best friends out of pointless pride, and so did not try to lure him out of his dignity coma.

He hadn’t changed much. Since last year, or the year before that, and certainly not since the year before that. He had been a tall thirteen year old with curiously mature features, and now he was a short sixteen year old with the sullen softness of childhood still lurking under his jaw. It made Rose aware of how young she herself must have looked to others, with her flabbylipped mouth and her gentle chin. Impossible to look in a mirror and extract, from the unnaturally motionless girl gathered there, a meaningful sense of what the world saw when it saw you at all: but looking at her friend (her one-day brother) from below, crouched by the soles of his feet, and she could make an educated guess.

John had moved to the other side of Dave’s prone body, so that he cast a sharp shadow over Dave’s ribcage, and the light streamed around his edges, catching red on his black hair. He looked like his father, Rose thought: and as he drew his X, his eyes were briefly grave.

“It is,” she said. “When is Jade coming, by the way?”

“She said something about technological difficulties,” said John, his frown as easy as his smile. “But probably sometime tonight. I hope.”

“Reassuring,” murmured Rose, and let her hand rest against Dave’s shin, unmoving. The skin was hot and smooth over the unforgiving ledge of bone.

“Pleasant as this has been, if we continue at this rate, we’ll exhaust every possible permutation of a tic-tac-toe game. Perhaps we should find another pastime.”

“Okaaaaaaaay,” said John, cradling the vowel in his mouth like a spider, or something similarly unpalatable. “What do you want to do?”

Which reasonable query left Rose utterly at a loss.

At home, the answer would have been easy: knit; or write; or steal from her mother’s liquor cabinet; or abuse the hapless denizens of all those corners of the internet that lay within reach of her metaphysical tendrils. None of these, however, were group activities; not even the latter, since John was not and never had been within her reach. She was perfectly cognizant of the wide purview of activities considered by writers of YA fiction to be normal hobbies for the venerability deficient, but somehow she couldn’t imagine any of them appealing to John, who was still sitting there, backlit by the last lousy dregs of the afternoon, looking for all the world as if he had grown up in that very spot.

He had, in a manner of speaking.

Once, she might have suggested a video game between friends.

“As host,” she said, eventually, her throat dry, “I believe it is your duty to select our activities. Not mine.”

“Oh, wow,” said John, “well, all right. Um. Hmm. Man, this is mega tough!”

They sat there for a minute. Rose still had her hand on Dave’s shin, it occurred to her; she would have drawn it back, only John wasn’t looking, and she was all at once convinced that as long as he didn’t look, it was all right. It was even natural, to feel the grain of Dave’s skin under her palm, the coarseness of the hairs there.

The thought _four months_ came and went, like a flash of sun glimpsed from behind dark trees.

Rose couldn’t remember when spending time with these people had ceased to be a relief from the awful tedium of the universe. She couldn’t _remember_. She felt the pressure of the fading day, and it was as if she were nine again, alone, waiting for the Fun Fairy to come and kiss her on the cheek. Now, at sixteen, she would have settled for the Anything But This Fairy. How far she had fallen. Or descended, really: gone willing down the steps.

Mr. Egbert coughed, from the doorway. “Dinnertime, kids,” he said.

Dave sat up as if burned. Rose, with some care, removed her hand from his leg and replaced it in her lap, although she felt no particular embarrassment. It was possible, she thought dimly, that something hung askew in her brain; but John said, “Morning, sunshine!” and Dave looked at her and said “Is the bacon and Egbert ready?” without inflection.

They went downstairs in a line, because the stairs were too narrow to walk abreast. Not that they were in a habit, really, of walking shoulder to shoulder, edge to edge.

*

TG: theyre not really nightmares  
TT: I know.  
TT: How long has it been? Since they started up again.

*

“So,” said Mr. Egbert, “how’s school?”

“Dad,” said John, patiently, “school’s out. It’s summer.”

Mr. Egbert laughed a little and shook his head; he couldn’t, however, hide his confusion, which turned his eyes fuzzy in the finely lined expanse of his face. “Of course,” he said.

“So,” said Dave, “good.”

“What?” said Mr. Egbert.

Dave said nothing. Rose took pity on the man, because he had, after all, saved them from their own lack of imagination by his decision to prepare an early dinner, and one good turn deserved another.

“Strider is implying that school is enjoyable,” she said, “when it’s not in session.”

“Aha,” said Mr. Egbert, and seemed honestly pleased by this explanation. “What a clever young man you are, Dave. Your brother must be very proud of you.”

Rose saw Dave straighten, in his chair, his ribcage settling evenly on his spine for the first time that evening; she saw his hands still. She saw the delicate pink that infiltrated his pale ears.

Almost without thinking, she kicked him under the table. Nudged him, really, pressing her heel against his calf. He reacted as if she had stilettos on, though, deflating with a quick, frustrated glance in her direction; the anger drained out of his whole bearing like sand from a broken hourglass.

“Nice of you to say so,” said Dave, “Mr. Egbert. But it’s Rose who’s the clever one. She translated.”

“Well, I _know_ your mother is proud of you,” said Mr. Egbert, turning to her. The lamplight gleamed off the broad bridge of his nose. Rose found herself unable to look at it directly.

“Sure,” she echoed, and bent down to her plate. There was fish in black bean sauce, and peas, and cake on the side; she had spilled some of the sauce on the tablecloth, earlier, where it had promptly soaked in like squid ink or girl tears. She moved her napkin to cover the spot. She was aware of Dave’s gaze, behind his shades.

“Son,” Mr. Egbert began, his attention falling back on John. His body seeming to solidify and sharpen at the edges, now that his attention was on John. “Have I ever told you-?”

“Yes, Dad,” said John, clearly. Rose had not previously been aware that it was possible to look at once so irritated and so soft. For a while their forks clinked off the plates in silence: like the distant tick of interlocking gears.

*

TG: you want that nonlinearly or  
TT: Strider.  
TG: since april  
TG: its always since april  
TT: Yes.  
TT: Regular as a floral clock.  
TG: youre the lilac breeder here  
TG: you tell me  
TT: In short, it keeps happening.  
TG: fucking yes it does  
TG: so whats the diagnosis, doc

*

They all agreed to call it an early night; no one so much as suggested staying up to wait for Jade. Rose, who was not tired, lay nestled in her sleeping bag in the guest bedroom and watched the moonlight stretch across the ceiling plaster in quadrangles of blue.

It had been an hour since she’d stopped tossing and abandoned turning when the music began.

At first, she nearly didn’t recognize it. It wafted bodiless and strange through the room, without source or end. And then she realized: John was playing the piano, below.

The song went on for some time, or else he played two very similar sounding pieces and she missed the break. It was somehow hard to get a fix on the sound; she tried to track its eddying and flow, but she drifted. When it was over, she heard voices, muffled. Dave, she thought, but the voice that was not John’s was pitched deep. His father, then. She was in some ways glad that she didn’t hear what he said. At the same time, she was desperately curious to know if he had stood there, while John played. If he had listened thoughtfully to the notes and spoken after, unobliquely, about the business of making music. It was like standing outside the thick meniscus of a story, to hear the rise and fall of their speech.

After a while she lifted her head from the floor and went and pressed her ear to the wall that separated her room from John’s.

She heard: rough breath. The hush that comes when another person listens very intently for something that doesn’t exist yet in the world.

Eventually, she fell asleep that way, with her ear full of the not-noises Dave made as he waited for the voices below to resolve themselves into words. Eventually she dreamed.

*

TT: Insane.  
TT: And...  
TG: and?

*

It was one when the knock on the door came. _The witching hour_ , Rose thought, and then felt guilty- not so much for the quality of the pun as the subject.

She sat up. Her sleeping bag had slid away from her in the night; she stood, the goosebumps were already forming on her skin.

The top of John’s head was just visible on the stair when she went out onto the landing. He was already halfway down. Dave came out a moment after she did, lurching a little with tiredness, his hair thoroughly disheveled and his glasses on but askew.

“The prodigal sister returns,” said Rose.

He shuddered in a long cascade of motion. Rose was faintly disappointed that his glasses didn’t fall off his nose.

“Let’s just go meet her, huh?” he said, unevenly.

“Of course.”

Jade looked luminous, on the doorstep. Admittedly this was at least partly because her dress was coated in a fine layer of white dog hair; but there was no accounting for the brilliance of her smile by the addition or subtraction of fur. There was no sign of any recognized human form of transport in the street behind her.

“Hi, guys!” she said. The scattering of white hairs on John’s T-shirt suggested that they had recently partaken in a friendly embrace. Rose deduced this in time to understand what was taking place when Jade launched herself at her, but that didn’t reduce the force of the impact, and there was nonetheless something essentially surprising about the fact that Jade had her warm hands on Rose’s back, her warm chin in Rose’s shoulder. She was a good hugger. Possibly it came of having been raised by a dog, thought Rose; perhaps having grown up around Bec had instilled in her an instinctual sense that the most important part of any hug was keeping the huggee still.

She let go as quickly as she had latched on. When she turned on Dave, though, he stepped back, holding up his hands. “ _No touchie Strider,_ ” he said, in an accent not his own.

In the instant before Jade’s arms dropped to her side, Rose was afraid. Jade looked at Dave and something dimensionless passed between them, something in whose volumeless mass there was no space or time for words. “Meanypants,” said Jade, and Rose felt her breath begin to move again inside her.

*

TT: Contagious.

*

This is what Rose dreamed:

Shade, everywhere, pooling in the crannies of blue stone. It was what the place was named for, after all. But there was surprisingly little wind. Dave, beside her, threw up his hands and said, “I’m lost.”

“Then all of man is lost,” she said, and he turned to her with hugely naked eyes, squid and worse things swimming reflected in his pupils.

“Egg-fucking-zactly,” he said. His pupils were blown wide, so that each iris was drawn as thin as a knife’s blooded edge.

*

TG: i was afraid youd say that  
TT: Yes.  
TT: What about now?  
TG: what  
TT: Are you still afraid?

*

“Rose. Rooooose. Rose, wake up! _WAKE UP, FUCKA-_ ”

“What,” said Rose. Or, more accurately: “Wstfgl,” said Rose.

“We’re going to the beach,” said Jade, sweetly.

“What?”

“The beach,” said Jade, “like, with buckets? And sun lotion?”

“You realize that could describe any number of activities,” mumbled Rose, but she opened her eyes, with a sigh.

Jade, predictably, was upright and as groomed as Jade ever was; her hair hung in dark gouts down the back of her white sundress. “Hurry up,” she said, “or John’s dad will make so many sandwiches that his car won’t be able to take our weight.”

“Ha ha,” said Rose. “What time is it?”

“Eleven.”

She’d been sleeping for ages. She could have slept for another month, or four. Her eyes seemed swollen in their sockets, and the light stung them for far longer than it should have, as if her head had stored additional reserves of darkness during the long hours in gloom, its sensitivity dragged long by the pull of night, preserved.

She got unsteadily to her feet. Jade gave her pyjamas an appraising glance, and Rose fought the urge to smooth out violet silk with her cold fingers.

“Um,” she said.

Jade stared at her blankly. “Are you changing or what, genius?”

“When you put it like that,” said Rose, and began stripping, trying not to think about how Jade was watching her reveal herself piece by piece; about how Jade was not, in all likelihood, thinking anything of it. _I would have made a joke, once,_ Rose thought. Jade would probably still laugh.

*

TG: at night i see you burning like soggy kleenex  
TT: Soggy kleenex isn’t particularly flammable.  
TG: exactly  
TT: Ah.  
TG: you are the slowest fucking sacrifice ive ever met  
TG: yes rose, i am still fucking afraid

*

It was a short drive to the seaside, although the seaside was a far cry from what Rose had vaguely pictured when Jade had made her announcement. The skies were overcast; the water moved blockily against the shore, and the interior curve of the waves showed green, like cut glass.

Rose could not work out what she had been expecting until she sat, on the shallow dune Mr. Egbert pointed out, and felt the hard crush of particulate matter beneath her thighs. Then she knew. She reached down and carded her fingers through the sand. It was pale- not white, and certainly not white enough, but pale.

She tasted bile. Bile, as it happened, tasted not unlike alchemized gushers, on the tongue.

“We should make a sand castle,” said Jade, some time later. Rose didn’t know how long she had been staring at the plump mounds of sand formed by the splay of her hand, but it had been long enough for Jade to go into the water and come back, her long feet mottled pink and white from cold, her toes armored with cracking wet sand.

“Good idea,” said John, reaching unironically for his trowel.

“Better a sand castle than letting the icy northern spray fondle my nads,” was Dave’s assessment.

“Okay,” said Rose. She lifted her hand away from the ground, and flexed it, feeling the grains caught in the lines of her palm. Past and future, full of fucking sand, she thought.

It could have been worse. It could have been raining. The rain could have caught the light.

*

TT: I don’t remember as much as you.  
TG: no shit sherlock  
TT: Now that you mention it, though...  
TT: I remember how it felt to burn.  
TG: oh  
TT: Yeah,  
TT: Oh.

*

It became apparent that none of them actually knew how to go about building a sandcastle, save John, who set to with the businesslike intensity of a bespectacled beaver. Jade gave it a valiant effort, but produced mostly modern sculpture, her scientist’s thumbs pulling lopsided geometry and canine ridges out of the featureless beach. Dave spent about two seconds mounding mud and then went hacking at it with his (borrowed, he assured her) shovel. The tendons in his wrist stood out like measuring tape.

Rose, for her part, thought to build a sand R’lyeh, starting with the contents of the vaults: but suckers were harder to craft than she would have imagined, and she kept mistaking the salt dampness of the sand for absorbed blood.

As a child, her mother had occasionally taken her on outings like this. Superficially like this, anyway; complete with toys and an ocean. Generally, she had retaliated by nobly failing to complain about the grit inside her shoes, and paying close, passionate attention to whatever book she was reading at the time. She did not think she had ever taken the time to breathe in her surroundings, or to consider the barren, waiting strangeness of places where one thing ended and another began. She had made up for that oversight later, of course. And in the past three years her mother had once not taken her to the beach.

“This is stupid,” said Dave.

“Your face is stupid,” said Jade, packing down the top of what looked like a disproportionately large and bulbous snout with the bottom of her pail.

“Yeah, Dave, stop pouring ‘apple juice’ on our parade,” said John. He broke off from his intent castle-building for just long enough to produce a truly moving set of airquotes around ‘apple juice’, and then returned to his task.

“What about how we have chosen to beguile the hours offends you, Dave?” said Rose.

“I don’t know, maybe how we’ve all done enough _building shit_ to last us a lifetime?”

Jade and John looked at each other. The light flashed off Jade’s glasses.

“What?” said John.

Dave’s smile, sharp and tense, didn’t so much fade as slip, sliding sideways in the set of his face.

“We used to be really good at fortresses,” he said.

Sandy water dripped from John’s hand in a ploppy stream. Jade shifted, her posture curling inward.

Rose shook her head, minutely. Dave lifted his chin.

“Think I’m gonna take a walk,” he said. “Before I get an architecture allergy.”

He turned, and glanced back over his shoulder, at her. Rose saw it out of the corner of her eye, the turn, the bitter twist of his spine.

“I think he wants to be alone,” Jade stage-whispered, her eyes cool and kind in the wintry light.

By the time Rose looked up he was already moving away, his hands in his pockets. He cut across the slope and down into the wetter sand, still freshly sheened with water from where the tide had just retreated; his footprints were like soot stains on a mirror.

Rose helped Jade with her sand atrium, and noted the passage of strangers.

*

TT: It really wasn’t that bad, actually.  
TG: yeah  
TG: right  
TG: youre hilarious  
TG: all these sides splitting  
TG: sides i didnt even know i had going kaput at the seams  
TT: Dave.

*

It was surprisingly loud on the roof; there, you could hear the distant noise of cars, and the squeak of the weathervane, and if, say, a UFO had come swooping overhead, you would have been able to hear that, too.

At home the only sound to be heard on the roof was the clink of bottles in the room just below. Dave kept twitching when the shadow of a cloud went overhead, or his sneakers scraped too loudly off tile. He was, she supposed, waiting for the trick. The duel. There wasn’t even any one long flight of stairs in the Egbert household to roll down, but she didn’t mention that.

She still had sand in her socks from the beach. She would have liked to take a shower, but John had insisted they go up and watch the sunset, and John was John, so Rose was now, Roselike, doing her level best to ignore the rolling irritation of the grit.

There was a pink sky overhead, and a golden fretting of clouds. John and Jade were pointing out fabulous beasts and formless futures, spelled out in cirrus masses, and she did not know how they could bear the opacity of the sky.

She rolled half onto her side, the better to observe the transparency of Dave, who had one arm pillowed under his head and one arm thrown angular over his eyes.

“Ever get deja vu?” she asked.

“ _Never_ ,” said Dave, vehemently.

That startled her, loathe though she was to admit it. That caught her off-guard. Increasingly, the world was full of muted reminders of things she could not quite recall. The sharpness of a lost past broke through the cotton candy again and again, as she chewed.

But then, she thought, perhaps Dave knew too much, in too much detail, to make metaphors. It was almost funny. A lifetime of obscuring his own vision, and here he was, forced to perspicacity by some merciless quirk of- what? Genetics? Personality?

He was starting again, she could see. He had sat up. “We should go,” he said, “sunset’s over, party’s done, your dad’s probably got the fucking scrabble board set up and waiting...”

“What? No way,” said John, “we have to wait for the stars to come out!”

A nameless expression crawled across Dave’s face.

“No, we don’t,” he said. “It’s not like they’re even our stars.”

(And this at least was true, Rose knew. According to every extant record, the stars had always been this way, but Rose’s mother was an astronomist and she had grilled maps of the sky into Rose early- albeit by proxy and with Rose’s cultivated resistance slowing her down for every step of the way. Rose could trace out patterns that no longer glimmered in the firmament by rote, pointing to blank dark places in space and almost feeling the sting of the star that should have been there on her fingertip. It was futile and achingly insufficient, and sometimes, doing it, she thought inexplicably of sashes. Of bolts of cloth hugging her waist and delivering her measurements across a universe to the waiting hands of a constellation.)

“Uh, yeah, they’re stars, they don’t belong to anyone,” said John. “But they’re super cool!”

“Yeah, who doesn’t like stars?” added Jade.

Rose couldn’t stop herself. “Don’t you have a favorite constellation, Dave?”

Dave trembled.

“Fuck,” he said; “ _yes_ ,” he said, “I have a fucking favorite constellation. Libra. It’s totally bitching.”

Rose bowed her head. She had no interest in seeing Jade and John’s mystification.

“Which one is Libra?” said Jade, at last.

“Nothing,” said Dave. He picked himself up, and disappeared through the open door, into the house. It happened so quickly as to be an almost meaningless event; like catching a glimpse of a bird running across a road, wings half-spread, and finding no significance in the blur of its legs. This time, he didn’t look back over his shoulder.

It was possible, Rose thought, that they would rehearse this scene over and over, all of them learning the rut of their roles, until Dave simply didn’t show up in the first place.

John was staring at the open door, obviously upset; she saw Jade take off her glasses and rub her eyes with curled fists. The two of them were limned in light. The unfathomable difference between who they were and who they had been; it was _there_ , curving brilliantly around the rim of Jade’s folded glasses in a long line of gold. The sight of it made Rose want very badly to flip a table, or perhaps a scrabble board.

She stood. “Rose,” said Jade, “are you-” and Rose said, “Yes.”

*

TT: Dave?  
TT: Are you still there?

*

The thing about the Egbert house was that it was, ultimately, quite small. In Rose’s house it was possible to lose your bearings, or your cat; you could sink through level after level of ultramodern architecture, so avant garde it wrapped right around and was now eating the garde’s conventional dust, hearing no footsteps but your own. The first time Rose had searched the place in full, after Jasper’s disappearance, she was seven. It had taken her a week.

She wondered if Dave would appreciate the implicit comparison of his person and her deceased pet.

But there was no size and emptiness to console herself with here. She went patiently, room by room, and it was ten minutes before she ran out of rooms. He was not even to be found in the depths of the closets.

With a sinking feeling in her stomach, she checked the garage, but his motorcycle hadn’t budged from where he’d parked it. The handlebars gleamed at her. “I’d like to see you do better,” she told them, before remembering that talking to inanimate objects was not a hallmark of her particular subgenre. Not that her life was really genre fiction at all, these days.

_Is there anything you do that’s not sending dudes on quests_ , she remembered.

How the tables had turned. Even if this was less a quest than a game of hide and seek.

She stepped out of the garage and breathed in the smell of a dozen identical lawns. The grass glittered underfoot. Dew, scattered in spheres across the upright blades, shone white like doomed gods’ eyes.

She saw something move, in the tree by John’s bedroom window.

*

TT: Of course I wouldn’t want to repeat the performance.  
TT: But slow as it was, it was faster than living.

*

The curtains in John’s room flapped loose where they had been left closed, and there was a toe-shaped smudge on the window sill, glaringly dark against white paint. She should have seen it on her first check, but she had been looking for Dave, who tended to occupy rooms like a slouching sun; not for evidence of absence.

She went to the window, and rested her hands on either side of the footprint, and leaned out.

The limbs of the tree had grown long in the years since she had last had reason to consider its relationship to the house; now, one bough reached across the space intervening, its endmost twigs almost close enough to scratch the glass. Or they would have been, if the window hadn’t been open, already.

Dave was sitting at the seamy junction where branch met trunk; it was broad enough, there, that he could sit with one leg dangling over the side, his other leg folded in front of him. His foot rested lightly on a knot and he was flexing it, so that it pointed toward her, and then away, and then back. The pantscuff was hiked up to reveal a daring glimpse of ankle.

“Hey,” he said.

“How high up are we, do you think?,” Rose said. “Twenty feet? Thirty?”

“Used to be that you could fly,” said Dave.

“Hmm,” she said; and she clambered over the sill, and onto the end of the branch.

It bent under her, but there were worse things than branches that could bend under you. The fabric of spacetime. The certainty that your mother was immortal. Rose went on, unperturbed by the shivering of wood.

Dave, on the other hand, almost fell off that shit.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, “ _warn_ a guy, would you,” but a smile pulled treacherously at the corner of his mouth.

“Constant vigilance,” said Rose.

She edged forward on her hands and knees until she reached a place where she could perch comfortably, half a meter away from him, straddling the bough.

“Haha,” said Dave. He tilted his head, the movement strange and discrete in a way that made her think of birds. “Why’d you follow me?”

“Because I didn’t last time,” said Rose, which was true.

Dave’s lip curled. “No, seriously.”

“Because I couldn’t take it any longer, then.”

He nodded, once, brisk and laughably professional, and then exhaled. In the moonlight he looked blue and grainy as living stone.

“What did they say?” he asked.

Rose watched him.

“I don’t remember,” she said.

He did smile, at that. It made him look obscurely angry, and Rose thought of Jade’s fingers, drumming on rooftile.

“That’s,” she clarified, “what they said.”

He looked at her, and made a noise, inarticulate and small.

*

TT: You of all people must know that.

*

“I know,” said Dave.

*

TG: sure  
TG: its like the entire fucking world is face down in the gutter and you can see little crusts of vomit and toothpaste and tomato sauce on its shirt  
TG: you can see the sad unbeatboxable swell of its breathing  
TG: and you honestly but you cant recognize it  
TG: its got the right shirt and itd have the right shoes if it hadnt accidentally tied its shoes to a policemans head earlier  
TG: it would have the right face if you rolled it over and looked it in the face  
TG: but its nothing its no one its not the person you left  
TT: And in the time intervening it’s somehow acquired a luxurious beard.  
TG: pretty much  
TT: We weren’t very good at the jobs the game gave us.  
TT: But lately I’ve been trying to see.

*

“So what now?” he said.

“Well,” said Rose, “you played your hand a little earlier than I was expecting, which could make for a very awkward week, if you let it. But I think-”

“So what _now_?” repeated Dave, his pitch rising. “Now. Like right now. The indivisible fucking present, now. I get that minutiae isn’t your thing, but make an exception, huh?”

“Now?” said Rose, slowly.

*

TG: are you waiting for me to tell you ive been tilting at windmills and fucking nuns and shit  
TG: because i havent been knighting  
TG: my responsibilities as dave of guy dont leave room for those kinds of shenanigans  
TT: Shhh.  
TT: I’m trying to tell you something.  
TG: ok shoot

*

“Here and now,” said Rose, “we are alive.”

*

TT: You’re absolutely correct.

*

“Did you just get fucking Pterry up in this bitch,” said Dave, incredulously.

“Without a single saline-saturated trace of regret,” said Rose, and looked down.

The world tilted and reshuffled, becoming new.

There was a gust of wind. It rattled the leaves and carried John and Jade’s voices with it. “I get so angry, sometimes,” Jade was saying, on the near peak of the roof, and Rose craned her neck and saw nothing but the weathervane, creaking north, and south, and north again.

She leaned forward.

*

TT: The world changes while we dream up these regrettably phallic symphonies. One part recollection, one part an overwhelming desire to fuck our mother, all parts... distracting.  
TT: I can see as much as I like,  
TT: But I will never spot the moment of shift.  
TT: And you are never going to catch up with the future again.  
TG: are you just gonna tell me things i already know or  
TT: Do you feel lucky, Dave?  
TG: i  
TT: We are trapped in the world we saved, for better or for worse.  
TT: It’s trying to heal itself, you know. That much is obvious.  
TT: We could let it.  
TG: but what if were the wounds

*

“The whole desert section of _Small Gods_ was a goddamn travesty, anyway,” said Dave. Their faces were an inch apart. His eyes moved behind dark plastic, back and forth; he might have been reading words or omens written on her forehead. “There’s only so many times you can make a divine fungus joke and have it stay funny. He shoulda quit while he was ahead.”

“Let’s not,” said Rose.

“Huh?”

She slipped a hand under his arm to brace herself against the tree.

“Talk about sand,” she said, “or heat.”

He gave a shaky laugh. “Rose, the day we can’t talk about half-assed religious satire...”

“We won’t talk at all?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

*

TT: If we’re the wounds?

*

She kissed him.

He tasted like floating ash and steel; but that, she thought, was nothing that some Listerine couldn’t fix. There was sometimes an easy solution to destiny. His flank was warm against the inside of her wrist, and without hesitating she shifted her grip from the tree to his hip.

His mouth opened, under hers-

*

TT: Well.  
TT: There are all kinds of ways to cauterize.

*

It was later.

Rose rested her forehead against Dave’s. His breath was warm on her lips, entirely separate from the numbing cold of the night; a timeless artifact, removed from logic and linearity.

“Rose and Dave, sitting in a tree,” said John, softly.

“K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” said Jade.

“I suppose we rather left ourselves open for that one,” Rose said, unmoving.

“Like an unguarded Quidditch hoop for two identical fucking Harry Potter clones.”

“Harry was a seeker,” said Jade. “He didn’t aim for the hoops. Jeez.”

“Yeah, Dave, whither your completely awesome sports expertise?” said John.

Rose laughed, silently. She lifted her head from his, and turned, enjoying the stretch of her waist.

“Maybe Rose sucked it out of him,” said Jade. “Whooo-ee!”

“This is more straightforwardly humiliating than I had anticipated,” Rose remarked.

“Wasn’t anticipating anything,” said Dave.

A beat. John’s smile looked heavy and tender, like new growth.

“You guys still don’t know what I was talking about,” said Dave, looking from him to Jade.

“Nope!” said Jade. “But we were thinking,” and she glanced at John, the slant of her ears away from her skull sharp and doggy in the dark, “that you could always tell us.”

Dave looked at her. His shades were badly askew, and she could see the shadow of his lashes on his cheek, though she couldn’t see the eye in question.

“Sometimes,” she said, “it’s probably acceptable to let the pus run free, hmm?”

“Gross,” said John.

“Yes.”

Dave said nothing, for a while. Rose lifted one leg over the branch until she was sitting side saddle, so to speak, and let her feet hang free.


End file.
